Mark Thomas Manifesto (Radio 4 recording)
After seeing Terminator 4 last Thursday (see below), I went to a recording of Mark Thomas’s new two-part Radio 4 show based on his Manifesto stand-up tour.
Essentially, there isn’t too many differences in the format to Dave Gorman’s Genius - in that it’s based on public ideas, which are sometimes fleshed out by the presenter, and then there’s a vote at the end on which idea is the best one. The difference between Gorman and Thomas though is that Thomas is a political activist.
Before the show members of the audience were given a piece of paper and asked to write down ideas for things they’d like Thomas to campaign for - both sincere and silly ideas. Of course, being an egomaniac, I submitted one.
At the start of the show, Mark read some of them out… including mine! “Get Barack Obama to record a satnav voice”, I suggested. Brilliantly - it not only got a big laugh, but it got a round of applause.
I’m slightly dissappointed that after this amazing debut, I haven’t been given my own Radio 4 series yet.
The rest of the show was really good too (though obviously not as good) - brilliantly funny and entertaining, and interesting and moderately educational. It was like the BBC charter rolled into one show.
The other audience suggestions, the moderately sincere ones that a few minutes were spent on did have some problems though.
One member of the audience suggested that the power of the whips in Parliament should be removed - it was popular in the room, so I felt pretty awful mentally disagreeing with it entirely. My objection being that you elect governments based on their manifestos, and if they’re going to carry out any of these commitments then they need to make sure their people vote in a certain way. Sure, in a utopian world you would argue that we elect individuals to Parliament, but how can we really know their full views on every possible issue - so we need manifestos as essentially a shorthand. I’m open to the idea of giving MPs a free vote on things not covered in the manifesto, though.
The other idea that I disagreed with was that a referendum should be held before we go to war. This was supposed to be in wars of choice, rather than say, if we were being invaded. I can see a number of problems with this. Aside from losing the element of surprise, as we’ve seen around war-time it’s very easy to whip-up the public into a patriotic, militaristic frenzy - you just have to repeat the same lie often enough. And less cynically, it obviously takes referendums weeks, if not months to be planned and executed… what about if somewhere needed emergency humanitarian intervention, and the political will was there to save thousands of lives… but it still needed all of the faff of consulting the public.
I could go on about this for hours, so I’ll stop now whilst there’s a chance that maybe one or two people are still actually reading.
So yeah, there was some fairly fanciful ideas, but it was a thoroughly interesting and funny recording. I think it’s going to be broadcast… a week on Thursday, or something like that.
